The present invention relates, in general, to telephony communication and, specifically, to subscriber loop testing.
Telephone service is becoming available to the subscriber premise through a variety of systems. Telephone systems have been implemented using fiber optic cable, digital loop carrier, wireless local loop, telephony over cable television and other systems. It is often necessary to test different portions of the these systems including the subscriber loop interface circuit (SLIC), the subscriber wiring and the connections between a central office or head-end and a subscriber premise.
Conventional telephone systems use testing equipment at the central office to perform some of these tests. The test equipment is relatively expensive, large and complicated. In conventional systems, the test equipment is connected to a particular subscriber loop when the subscriber loop is tested. In systems where the subscriber premise is connected to the central office through only twisted pair wiring, the test equipment at the central office can be used to test any of the subscriber loops connected to the particular central office.
Since the test equipment in conventional systems requires twisted pair wiring from the central office to the subscriber premise, other testing methods must be used when the communication systems utilizes transmission media other than twisted pair for part or all of the communication path.
One method of testing these systems includes moving the conventional test equipment to the furthest point from the subscriber premise that is connected to the subscriber premise only through twisted pair wires. For example, in some "fiber to the curb" communication systems, testing equipment is installed at the transition point from fiber optic cable to twisted pair wiring. However, this solution requires multiple sets of testing equipment for each central office since each set of testing equipment can only test a subset of the total subscriber loops serviced by the central office. The cost of implementing such a test system becomes significant as the number of subscriber loop subsets serviced by a central office increases and, therefore, the number of test equipment sets increases.
In telephony over cable and other communication systems that use a communication media other than twisted pair wiring to the subscriber premise, installing conventional test equipment at the subscriber premise is cost prohibitive.
In addition, the test results obtained by test equipment at any point between the central office or head-end and the subscriber premise must be transmitted to the central office or head-end in order for corrective action to be taken.
Another solution is to manually test the subscriber loop by sending a repair person to the location of the subscriber loop. However, this is time consuming and expensive.
Therefore, there exists a need for an inexpensive and efficient method and system for testing subscriber loop circuits and subscriber wiring in telephone communication systems.